The Colourful Counsellor

26/02/2024

Workshop on Community 🌀

C O M M U N I T R E E S🌳

What qualities make community?

Using the metaphor of a tree ~ how might we reflect on what is needed for a successful community…

💡 Some ideas we had: Shared values, orientation ~ a vision/goal/purpose, acceptance and spaces for all types of folk, sheltering and growing, self responsibility and collective actions, openness and space for new ideas, boundaries, structure, old & new life cycles, creativity, social justice, equality. Branching out, global connectedness, online/ in person. Roots, feeding and being fed. Weathering the storms, being in it together through the struggles. Individuality and a collection identity. 🌀

15/12/2023

In good company. 📚

Therapy is political.

12/11/2023

Playback Theatre Manchester….where do I begin?!?!!! How do I capture the essence of Playback Theatre for those of you who’ve never experienced it…. 🤔

Imagine sitting in a room with a bunch of mostly strangers, a musician, and a company of actors. There will be a performance but what it will contain nobody knows…because it is the audience whose stories and memories are used as the material for the entirety improvised performance.

Last night we heard epic stories of journeys and change, migrating to Serbia on a cattle train which took over 3 weeks in -40 degrees, love affairs that stretched family trees, journeys of divorce and liberation, new beginnings and new not-quite-beginnings. It was beautiful hearing people share their heart stories, feeling connected and together and sharing our values of storytelling, ritual, reciprocity, creativity and community.

I wish everyone got to experience Playback Theatre. It’s cathartic and therapeutic and healing and uniting.

11/11/2023

Nails, book, beret 💚 🌱 🥦🫒🧃🪀🚛

22/09/2023

Hello Counsellors & Therapists 🫶🏼
We’re recruiting for a new counsellor in Oldham. It’s a wonderful place to work, lots of compassion and warmth. This role will combine loss focused work: both bereavement and living loss (dementia, terminal illness, ambiguous loss etc).

If you are interested and want to pay us a visit - we are having a free community art exhibition this Sat + Sun 12-4 🎨 🎧 ☕️ 🖊️ which provides a stellar opportunity to visit, ask questions and scope us out before applying.

This will be one-to-one and group support work, with plenty of opportunities for being creative as well. Thank you and please share😊

Full/part time fixed term/Permanent Contract. We are expanding our home care community service and are looking for some very special people to join our team.

13/09/2023

I’ve recently discovered this podcast, hosted by the excellent and exuberant , which shines a light on the approach .

Attachment, developmental trauma and relational trauma are three of my favourite areas of work, and although right now my client work doesn’t explicitly focus on these areas as the number 1 presenting issue; the way we grieve and relate to loss IS OF COURSE inextricably connected to our attachment patterns, our relationship dynamics with others and our experiencing of relationship with ourselves.

cPTSD is a cruel way to experience the world, the hell of navigating life inside of traumatising relational dynamics can make you feel like you are not in the driving seat of your own life. I’m pleased to have discovered Dr Helller’s work and look forward to diving in to the books I’ve ordered and expanding my skill set in this area further. Have any of my therapist friends come across NARM before?

13/09/2023

Public art that puts a smile on ya face 🦆 ♥️ I love the chorus of birds in this mural. Why not eh?

13/09/2023

Tell me you’re in therapy, without telling me you’re in therapy…..

27/08/2023

Bedtime journaling to you, and me 🫶🏼

“You are deeply deserving of being rooted in authentic love and living a beautiful life”

21/08/2023

🌀🌿Mandalas for Mindfulness🌿 🌀

Time for play and experiencing the benefits of therapeutic creativity.

How B E A U T I F U L are these pieces of nature art - created in our Art + Health ~ Creative Wellbeing programme for patients navigating life-limiting and serious illness.

08/08/2023

Me and my brain forever using a minimum of 5 different coloured pens to write notes & tackle tasks.

Funny anecdote ~ Back when I was an actor, theatre-maker and writer, I would colour code my scripts based on the internal emotional world of the character, and where the character was in their own narrative arc. I found it very daunting to look at a script in its totality, the idea of thousands of words in black text on a white page often felt overwhelming and too big a task to grasp -> creating a stagnant mental state of paralysis and avoidance. So by colour coding my scripts and associating emotions with colours, I was able to break the task down and make the emotional journey of the character make more sense to me. It maybe wouldn’t make sense to anyone else ~ but this way of processing and working genuinely helped me to digest the script and embody the character. (And I did all of this without any awareness or understanding that I was neurodivergent, just muddling through and finding my own way.)

👀 Nowadays you should see my online work calendar ~ best believe everything is colour coded. It was recently described by a colleague as a “work of art”.

I’ll take that 🤣🌈🫶🏼 🗓️

14/03/2023

Oh my goodness, Finding Michael is a remarkable documentary. I’m at a loss for words.

To be let inside the Matthews family’s deeply personal voyage to search for and attempt to return Michael’s body from Mount Everest is a privilege.

To be alongside their grief journey during this documentary was a privilege.

Grief is a primal experience. This documentary captured that.

It also got me thinking about all the folk who never got to see their loved ones before they died during the pandemic. Unlike Michael Matthews who died on Everest, the thousands of people I’m thinking of died much closer to home, yet there is a commonality in the trauma that accompanies an ambiguous loss, and the feelings of injustice that accompany a traumatic loss.

Grief is full of turmoil and stomach-churning suffering. There is another layer to never having had the opportunity to recover, say goodbye, or lay to rest your loved ones body.

I’m glad the documentary team didn’t edit out the moments of raw, primal grief. I believe the more we can allow ourselves to express what is held deep inside of us, the better chance we have of finding some sense of peacefulness.

At the end of the documentary Spencer says “Just because we didn’t find his body doesn’t mean I didn’t find him” ~ this right here is the definition of a continuing bond with your loved one. A beautiful and profound statement, and one that I hope brings some sense of peacefulness.

I’m also reminded of a quote I love by Dr Irvin Yalom that goes something like this- “if you don’t transform your trauma, you will transmit it on to those around you” and I think that’s what Spencer did via this documentary. Perhaps without realising, he has offered himself a way to transform some of this trauma, instead of unconsciously transmitting the pain on to others.